Digital technology is being rapidly applied to telecommunications applications including transmission, switching, and station equipment. When signals are encoded digitally, they are easily manipulated by computers and other systems that incorporate advanced very-large-scale integrated circuit technology (VLSI). The VLSI advantages include small size, high reliability, low cost, and low power consumption. As this trend continues, it is possible to perform previous functions, as well as new ones not possible before, with digital techniques that were formerly performed with analog circuits.
Signal processing is the generation, filtering, detection, and modulation of signals. Most algorithms for signal processing repeatedly use multiplications and additions. The input is a sequence of numbers with a new input value typically available every 125 microseconds. The output is another sequence of numbers that must be computed at the same rate. Processors, referred to as digital signal processors, have been designed which use a parallel, pipelined architecture providing maximum throughput by keeping all sections of the processor efficiently busy at all times. As technology advances, the processing capacity of digital signal processors has increased as well. With any given technology however, the maximum processing capacity does limit the magnitude or number of processing functions that can be performed by a single digital signal processor.